The wallpaper on the ceiling is now down, and as I suspected, there’s a fair few cracks. They’re not really that bad but you could see these cracks through the wallpaper; the wallpaper wasn’t ripped, but kind-of lumpy and bumpy, very obvious it wasn’t a smooth flat ceiling. In fact, the entire house is like this. I’m not a specialist in cracks, but to my understanding, all houses will have cracks appear over time – The ones to look out for that are problematic, are those that run across the ceiling and also down the wall, in one same line. None of these cracks go down the wall. None of these cracks are particularly wide either. So my very hopeful guess is that these are just caused from movement over the years, and its age. Of course the only way to truly determine the cause of this cracking would be to have a structural survey, but we’re not gonna go there.
So really, the dilemma now is, how do we go about fixing these cracks? In my mind there’s 2 options:
1. We fill/scrim the cracks and skim over the whole ceiling.
– Advantage: Less mess, easy to do.
– Disadvantage: The cracks are more likely to reappear, the plaster may blow.
2. We take down the ceiling and start again with fresh plasterboard.
– Advantage: Less likely cracks will reappear (unless its a joist problem…).
– Disadvantage: Messy, more work, and more costly.
After uhming and ahhing, I think we’re going to go with number 2 because even is we fill/scrim the cracks, I still don’t think it’ll look flat. We’ve never used plasterboard before, so this will be a first. It can’t look too much worse than it does right now though…
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